Jamie Wolf profiles Wong Kar-Wai in the New York Times:
The kind of person who might once have proclaimed ''Jules and Jim'' or ''Wings of Desire'' his or her favorite movie now rates Wong Kar-wai at the top of the list. Flirting with the conventions of genre (melodrama in ''Days of Being Wild''; Chinese swordsman adventures in ''Ashes of Time''; Hong Kong action movies in ''Chungking Express'' and ''Fallen Angels''), his meditative, pop-savvy films home in on emotional tipping points in the lives of young city-dwellers -- the moments that forever mark them and from which they cannot escape. Their witty invention, color-drenched visuals and romantic longing offer the kind of bittersweet satisfaction found in the fiction of Haruki Murakami or the photographs of William Gedney, about whose subjects John Cage once said, ''They seem to be doing happy things sadly, or maybe they're doing sad things happily.''
